Mental health: the challenge

John Myhill feels tackling mental health needs more imagination

I would like all Friends to consider whether we should separate off something that has an effect on all our lives: mental health.

In his book Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement Thomas Szasz shows that psychiatry took over many of the methods of torture and social control used in the witch trials and the Inquisition to provide scapegoats and suppress diversity.

Early psychiatrists even took the view that most of those convicted of witchcraft or heresy were, in fact, ‘mentally ill’, whereas it should be apparent to us that this is nonsense as it suggests that their persecutors were simply making a false diagnosis rather than a deliberate bid for power. Thomas Szasz makes quite clear that he believes psychiatry, and later psychoanalysis, rose to prominence by the same means as the witchfinders: by taking control of people who were being rejected by those around them.

The words ‘mental health’ imply a belief in ‘mental illness’ and our culture has firmly placed issues of mental illness in the hands of ‘experts and professionals’. Mental illness is growing, I believe, because our culture is rejecting an increasing number of people and making life for those with special abilities hard and traumatic.

Government may provide more money for different forms of ‘treatment’, but this simply increases the financial incentives to seek a psychiatric diagnosis – to gain, for example, access to certain benefits or seek employment, and this, in consequence, could be seen as colluding with the idea of mental illness. People with this label and those who try to help can gain from working to support each other; but I feel the real need is for all of us to stop viewing behaviour we dislike as a sign of ‘mental illness’.

Some people, of course, suffer physical illnesses like dementia and Huntington’s disease, which can produce distressing behavioural symptoms. But many forms of behaviour that we find distressing may also be opportunities for us to recognise a hidden talent. Hearing voices, as George Fox did at Lichfield, should not be dismissed as schizophrenia; nor should we assume that someone with strong mood swings has an ‘illness’ rather than an ability requiring support. It is time that we all started to look at our own talents, our own ‘personality’ (not a ‘disorder’), and to seek support when these create difficulties for others.

There is, I believe, no crisis in mental health in Britain today. There is a crisis in our lack of support for those suffering crisis and trauma, and our willingness to hand them over to the modern equivalent of the Inquisition. Suppressing their and our symptoms will hide real talents and make our society poorer.

---

Comments

Please login to add a comment